Tens of thousands of protesters filled Belgrade’s Slavija Square on Saturday, the latest and largest in a series of demonstrations that have persisted since November 2024, when the collapse of a canopy at Novi Sad’s newly renovated railway station killed sixteen people. What began as demands for accountability over the disaster — protesters suspected corruption had allowed substandard construction to proceed — has since expanded into a broader push for early elections and the removal of President Aleksandar Vucic. Saturday’s march arrived from multiple directions; Serbia’s state railway cancelled all trains to and from Belgrade, presumably to limit attendance. Police deployed teargas and stun grenades near the presidency building. Protesters burned rubbish bins. Banners read “Students Win.” The government branded the marchers terrorists and foreign agents. Vucic indicated elections might be held in September or November 2026. Nobody is satisfied.
The received wisdom
The liberal internationalist reading of Serbian politics is essentially this: Vucic is a right-wing populist autocrat, in the mould of Orbán, who has systematically hollowed out judicial independence, press freedom, and electoral fairness while maintaining the veneer of EU accession talks. The Novi Sad disaster gave ordinary Serbians — particularly young people who have watched a generation of their peers emigrate to Germany and Austria in search of reliable institutions — a concrete focal point for diffuse resentment. The students who have led this movement are not ideologically programmed; they are responding to lived experience of a state that is corrupt, incompetent, and contemptuous of accountability. The EU, which has threatened to withhold up to €1.5 billion in funding over democratic backsliding, should lean harder. The Council of Europe Human Rights Commissioner has pledged to monitor the situation. This is a democracy story in which the good guys are in the streets.
A different read
The basic facts of the liberal reading are accurate. Vucic runs a state whose formal institutions — courts, media regulators, election commissions — have been substantially subordinated to his party’s interests over fifteen years. The Novi Sad collapse was not fate; it was the downstream consequence of procurement processes that appear to have favoured connected contractors over competent ones. The students are right to be angry.
But the movement faces a structural problem that no amount of street energy can dissolve: it has, as journalist Tetyana Kekic observed on Al Jazeera, “no clear political platform or policies” and “no leader or personality which could really challenge the president.” This is not a minor tactical deficiency. It is the central challenge facing every protest movement that tries to convert popular anger into electoral power. The gilets jaunes in France, the 2011 indignados in Spain, the 2019 Hong Kong protests — all demonstrated that emotional intensity and tactical creativity cannot substitute for the institutional grind of building a party, selecting candidates, and persuading the median voter rather than the most committed activist.
Serbia’s opposition parties have been fractured and widely discredited for years — partly by their own failures, partly by coordinated pressure from the government. The students have so far declined to ally formally with existing opposition politicians, which preserves their moral credibility but limits their electoral leverage. There is a historical precedent worth studying. In 2000, the Otpor! student movement in Serbia helped bring down Slobodan Milošević, but it did so in coalition with a broad opposition alliance and crucially timed its action to coincide with an election Milošević had called, confident he would win. The organisational lesson was that street power needs an electoral channel or it exhausts itself. Some student leaders have indicated they plan to contest upcoming elections — that is the right instinct, and it is worth watching whether they can build the boring infrastructure that follows.
Then there is the Vucic question. He is authoritarian but also adaptive. His calculation for September-to-November elections appears to be that the movement will have peaked by then, that the opposition will remain fragmented, and that his rural and older constituency — which is largely unrepresented in Belgrade’s Slavija Square — will deliver him another term. He may be right. One of the persistent ironies of populist governance is that the leaders most expert at manufacturing crises are also the most skilled at surviving them. Vucic’s Serbia maintains enough of the formal apparatus of elections to deny protesters the clean moral narrative of a dictatorship simply refusing to hold a vote.
The EU’s leverage is real but limited. Serbia has been officially an EU candidate for fifteen years. The accession process has become so protracted and conditional that both sides have largely stopped pretending the endpoint is imminent. Brussels can threaten funding, as it has, but the track record of EU conditionality forcing genuine democratic reform in candidate countries — as opposed to cosmetic compliance followed by backsliding — is mixed at best.
What to watch
Watch whether the student movement takes the electoral plunge and registers as a political party or runs candidates through an alliance. That decision, more than any single demonstration, will determine whether this spring becomes 2000 or remains 2011. Track Vucic’s announcement of an actual election date — and whether the electoral commission’s rules are adjusted in the interim in ways that disadvantage new entrants. Watch for any repeat of the alleged sonic-weapon incident that disrupted the March 2025 Slavija protest; if Vucic resorts to instruments of physical repression beyond teargas, EU pressure becomes harder to ignore. And note whether the movement’s energy holds into the summer, when large outdoor protests are easier to sustain, or dissipates as the academic year ends and students scatter.
— J